I've read dozens, maybe hundreds of pieces about how some particular group or organization or ethnic minority has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and truthfully I've gotten pretty tired of them. Roughly speaking, it turns out that the pandemic affected everyone and it affected them in pretty similar ways.
But even with that in mind, Perry Stein's look at Ketcham Elementary, a school in one of Washington DC's poorest neighborhoods, is genuinely heart wrenching. I won't try to summarize it. By now it's a cliche to call people dealing with COVID-19 "heroes," but this story is truly filled with them.
The endless preoccupation of the US news industry with inflation is truly spectacular. They will simply take any opportunity, no matter how trivial, to hoist the red flag of high inflation right around the corner.
I'm not even saying the stuff in this particular piece is wrong. Rather, it's ancient. It's a bunch of trends that inflation hawks have been warning about for years. And who knows? Maybe they're finally right. But the article exhumes all these dusty warnings for no particular reason, as near as I can tell, aside from the fact that it provides yet another excuse to blather on about inflation, inflation, inflation.
Wouldn't it be great if our news media calmed down about inflation and instead decided to scare everyone constantly about the possibility of high unemployment? Or stagnant blue-collar wages? That would be a service.
If you get COVID-19, you probably won't die. Probably. But about a quarter of all people who come down with COVID-19 develop "long COVID," a series of symptoms that range from the annoying to the severe. These symptoms often last a year or longer and include:
Loss of smell or taste
Depression or anxiety
Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
Tiredness or fatigue
Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
Chest or stomach pain
Erectile dysfunction
Headache
Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
Joint or muscle pain
Pins-and-needles feeling
Diarrhea
Sleep problems
Dizziness on standing (lightheadedness)
Change in smell or taste
Changes in period cycles
Blood clots
Strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome
Multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS)
If you don't get vaccinated, you run a substantial risk of contracting one or more of these problems for an unknown length of time. That's way more serious than the rare and generally mild side effects of the vaccine.
Millennials and Gen Xers, I'm told, refuse to use the telephone. Today the New York Times tells me that Gen Z wants to kill off email:
Members of Gen Z do seem to agree with their elders on one thing: Email. Ugh. And, if we’re lucky, maybe they can one day save everyone from overflowing inboxes.
....Adam Simmons, 24, prefers to communicate using “literally anything but email.” Mr. Simmons, who is based in Los Angeles, started his own video production company after graduating from the University of Oregon in 2019. He primarily communicates with his eight employees and his clients, which are mostly sports teams, over text, Instagram messages and Zoom calls.
If you read very closely, you'll notice that the peg for the entire piece is a study from a consulting firm called Creative Strategies about which apps are most used for collaboration with fellow workers. This puts everything in a different light. Of course young workers are abandoning email for collaboration. Email sucks for collaboration. Even we dinosaurs who use it that way know perfectly well that it's horrible.
But collaboration is just one thing that we do at work. We also communicate with the outside world, for example, and email works fine for that. Adam Simmons may prefer text, Instagram, and Zoom calls, but that's just personal preference. In what way is a huge pile of unread texts or an unwieldy Instagram inbox any better than email? I'd even say it's probably worse. At least email once offered the minor blessing of putting everything in one place. Nowadays you have to check five or six different apps to see if anyone is trying to get your attention.
The underlying problem here is obvious: We have made communication too easy. And just as cheap hamburger spurs people to buy more hamburger, cheap communication spurs people to communicate more. What we really need is to figure out a way to make communication more painful.
Consider the olden days. In 1990 there was only one way for people to get my attention: they had to call me and then leave a message if I wasn't there. The post-Boomer generation is quite correct that this was a pain in the ass. It leads to the dreaded "phone tag," and it can also lead to misunderstandings because nothing is in writing. On the other hand, it's also true that a two-minute conversation can often take the place of five or six emails. And I probably got no more than a dozen phone calls a day.
Millennial and Gen X folks had no idea of the havoc they were creating when they gave up on phone calls and instead moved to "more convenient" methods of communicating. For one, more convenient meant higher volumes. For another, it was basically an excuse to avoid actual conversations, where sometimes people get mad at you. For folks who don't really want to communicate all that much in the first place, email and text have advantages: It's easier to ignore anger in written communication; it's easier to ignore written communication completely; and written communication favors highly educated verbal folks.
So they got their wish. Among the young, the phone is dead, replaced by a massive increase in overall communication. How's that working out for you?
Am I nuts? Of course I am. More specifically, am I nuts to think that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a good handle on how much prices are rising? Here's the Washington Post today:
Rents are starting to surge in many parts of the country as the economy reopens and young people return rapidly to cities....Nationwide, rent prices are up 7.5 percent so far this year, three times higher than normal, according to data from Apartments.com. Analysts expect rent prices to keep climbing for the foreseeable future, a major burden for renters and a warning sign that higher inflation could linger far longer than the White House and Federal Reserve keep predicting.
This actually seems plausible. And yet, here are the BLS numbers:
Not only have rents not risen 7.5% so far this year, BLS says they've risen a paltry 0.5% in big cities and less than 1% in midsize cities since January. And rent growth has been falling steadily for over a year. Compared to 12 months ago, rent is up a very modest 1.2% in big cities and 2.6% in midsize cities.¹
In other words, for most people rent is a bright spot. It's one of the slowest growing major expenses out there.
So what's with the Post? It turns out to be an old story. First off, they ignore the BLS numbers completely. I don't know why. Maybe it ruins their story. Second, if the local numbers from Zillow are to be believed, rents are spiking only in a handful of hot midsize cities: Stockton, Phoenix, Fresno, Boise City, and a few others. Rents are down in places like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.
But guess what? Rents are always spiking in a handful of hot cities. The only thing that changes is which cities happen to be hot. If the Post wants to write a story about which cities have lost their luster and which cities have gained, that's fine. But this headline is just plain wrong:
Rent prices are soaring as Americans flock back to cities
Readers shouldn't have to plow through ten paragraphs to find out that this applies only to "more than a dozen cities," which is about 1% of all the cities in the United States. In the other 99%, rent is fine. Come on, folks.
¹We'll get new inflation numbers through June in a few days. Maybe they'll show a huge spike in rents! But I doubt it.
Many of the Taliban’s advances have faced little to no resistance in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal. Without close U.S. support, specifically airstrikes, Afghan forces have been unable to hold territory even in parts of the country far from the Taliban’s traditional heartland in the south.
“It was exactly like a dam breaking down,” said Abdul Aziz Beg, a member of the Badghis provincial council who was in the city when the assault began. Beg said the breach was triggered by the deputy police chief deserting his post. After he fled, the Afghan police staffing key checkpoints protecting Qala-e Nau abandoned their positions, he said, allowing Taliban fighters to easily enter the capital.
Conservatives have used this—and similar scenes elsewhere—to criticize President Biden's decision to withdraw completely from Afghanistan. This is pretty rich considering that it was one of their presidents who got us stuck there in the first place and another of their presidents who promised to withdraw but never had the guts to do it.
Biden says he trusts the Afghan military, but this is obviously just happy talk. Like all of us, he knows perfectly well what's going to happen next. As this article makes all too clear, after 20 years of American assistance the Afghan military is still so feeble that the Taliban can practically stroll into cities and take over. They will continue to do this, and by the end of the year they will control most or all of the country.
This is an enormous tragedy on many levels. But it's plain that the Afghan government is fatally impotent and its military is inept. It's equally plain that the United States has tried everything it reasonably could and has had no success in turning this around.
It takes some guts to order the US withdrawal knowing that it means Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban within months. This is why no previous president has done it. Kudos to Biden for recognizing reality and following through on this regardless of the political hit he's bound to take for it. It's the right thing to do.
Our new box has attracted the attention of both cats. Oddly, though, they don't squabble over it. They just take turns. Here is Hilbert peering over the side of the box to keep an eye on whatever the humans are doing in the living room.
